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Dressing for Class
Alice B. Kehoe
To the Editor:
Janet Galligani Casey illuminated a major source of diversity to which American society wishes to be blind in “Diversity, Discourse, and the Working-Class Student,” published in the July–August issue. She did not mention a central aspect of that problem, dress as sign and signal of social identity.
African American students can wear their hair “African” (or natural) and a dashiki or bright African-patterned dress. Muslim women wear headscarves, Jewish men yarmulkes, Asian women clothing from their homelands. Working-class American students, how ever, are strongly advised not to wear clothes and hairstyles bespeaking working-class taste. What does a working-class student learn from demonstrations of “how to dress for success”?
Back in the early 1980s, I served on an American Anthropological Association committee looking at bias against women in our discipline. One member wrote us a poignant letter describing how she persisted in wearing the polyester slacks, teased hair, and jewelry favored by all her female relatives and old friends. She said that over and over, professors explained to her that she must dress middle class if she expected to be taken seriously as a graduate student. “I am discriminated against not so much as a woman, but as a working-class person,” she reported. Discrimination based on social class was not on our committee’s assignment, and it did not get publicized.
Working-class students frequently enter college handicapped by poor high school preparation, an ethos valuing physical activities over the “life of the mind,” the notion that no one reads books just for enjoyment, and (I’ve noticed) lack of the habit of always noticing written materials. On top of overcoming these drawbacks, we ask them to disrespect the tastes of their people.
Alice B. Kehoe
(Anthropology)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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